Sir Humphrey Appleby, GCB, KBE , MVO, MA (Oxon).

Minister, the traditional allocation of executive responsibilities has always been so determined as to liberate the ministerial incumbent from the administrative minutiae by devolving the managerial functions to those whose experience and qualifications have better formed them for the performance of such humble offices, thereby releasing their political overlords for the more onerous duties and profound deliberations which are the inevitable concomitant of their exalted position.

Source: Sir Humphrey Appleby; Yes, Minister – BBC TV, 1982

Sir Humphrey Appleby, GCB, KBE , MVO, MA (Oxon).

I have served eleven governments in the past thirty years. If I had believed in all their policies, I would have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to going into it.

I would have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel. And of denationalising it and renationalising it.

On capital punishment, I’d have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolishionist.

I would’ve been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac.

But above all, I would have been a stark, staring, raving schizophrenic.

Source: Sir Humphrey Appleby; Yes, Minister – BBC TV, 1982